DIRECT CHALLENGE TO BLAIR RE SCOTS’ INTERESTS

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23 June 2005

Hudghton (Greens/EFA) - Mr President, Prime Minister, it seems that French and Dutch voters have startled you into some attitude changes. Now all of a sudden you say that the EU needs modernisation and yet not so long ago you told us that this was what the Constitution was for. Now you find the agriculture funding package that you signed up to not so long ago unacceptable. Now you cannot sign up to a budget compromise, because it is not the right deal for Britain. Yet your own government has repeatedly signed up to disastrous deals, particularly for Scotland, such as the reform of the common fisheries policy. Speaking of disasters for Scotland, your own line on the EU budget limit would end structural funding in Scotland at a cost of a billion pounds. While it is true to say that the EU institutions need reform, it is also true that euroscepticism has grown in Scotland because you have continued the traditional UK Government practice of selling out Scotland's interests in cobbled together compromises. The best form of constitutional reform for Scotland would be to represent ourselves in the European Union as an independent Member State.